Category Archives: Future Projects

My time off from my full-time employment is rushing toward a close. I have less than six weeks remaining before I head back, and I feel like I don’t have a lot to show for it. My intention was to write my next two books in the ten months I had off. Instead, I’ve got two partially-written first drafts, neither of which is close to being finished. I don’t know if I’ll make significant progress on either of them before I have to rejoin the daily grind.

At the beginning, I was working extremely well. The first couple of months were easily my most productive — maybe even more productive than the entire period after them. Then I had some recurring issues with my chronic depression playing up quite badly, which threw me off and it’s been an extreme struggle to try to get back into basically anything at all. On top of that, I had to move house in the middle of things so there were other things that delayed and stressed me and just sort of made everything a lot harder.

I did manage to write five short stories, all of which are available for free on this site and others. Some of them I’m honestly not overly fond of, and some of them I actually think are reasonably good. Even so, they’re fairly small things and I don’t really consider them significant accomplishments.

Just today, though, I stopped working on an actual Thing that is now basically finished.

A while ago, I’d been talking to my sister (an actress who graduated from the New York Film Academy a little while back) who mentioned that there aren’t a lot of scripts around for small, local directors who are looking to produce things, and suggested that if I wrote a script, she would be able to pass it around her contacts and we could all maybe do a thing together. I had a bit of a think about it and set down some base guidelines that I thought would be important if what I wrote was ever going to get filmed — I’d need to write something that would be cheap to produce, used minimal sets and actors, etc. An idea sparked right away, but it took a while for me to actually do some serious work on it.

I went through a couple of drafts, sent it through to my normal set of beta readers, did some reworking, and a week or so ago I sat down with a few people and we did a proper table read of the script. I made more edits based on feedback received from my ‘actors’ on the day, as well as going through the recording of the table read several times and making even more changes based on that. Now I think I’m basically done with it. I’ve sent it off to my editor for another read, just to catch any typos or other small mistakes that may have slipped through, but once he gives it the all clear I’ll be passing it along to my sister, who has some directors she’s planning on approaching with it.

I don’t want to share too much of the contents, except to say it’s a horror script that should turn out a film about 15-17 minutes long. I wrote a very short blurb because I am in the habit of doing that with anything that I write these days, thanks to the short story competitions I’ve been entering, which I’ll also share:

No-one believed Allison was innocent. Her fanciful story about her parents being murdered by a monster from her childhood imaginings was a delusion at best; or a poorly thought-out lie at worst. That’s what the jury decided. They were wrong.

I don’t think it’s a great blurb, but it gets across the gist.

So yeah. I did a thing.

I have no illusions about the likelihood of it actually being picked up by a director, but it is a Finished Thing I can add to my list of other Finished Things and feel a bit better about myself. On top of that, writing a script was very different to writing a novel or a short story. Dialog works differently and you have to take a much more visual approach but also cut everything right back and not have any more description than is necessary. I’m glad I spent the time writing it, and feel like I learned some stuff along the way.

I’ve got one other side project that I have a fairly firm intention to complete before returning to work. I’ve talked about it on here before: Blackened Hearts.

We had the original first playtest way back in June, which I was exceedingly happy with. There were a lot of changes that I wanted to make, most of which I’ve now made, and I wanted to package it up in a professional-ish quality set of documents — again, most of which I’ve written and done. There is one major part I need to do still that will probably be quite a lot of work, but the bulk of the project is actually done. If I worked on it with any sort of real regularly, I would have been done by now.

As it stands, I need to (1) finish reviewing the character role descriptions and re-organising the item and power cards, (2) write some short, basic examples in the GM section for the end-of-game denouements, and (3) come up with new powers for more than half of the characters [this is the big one].

Once I’ve done that and put together everything in a convincing-looking package, it’ll go to my editor for checking. After that, I’ll be looking for someone else to run a playtest of it. Honestly, I might even just release it then if I’m happy enough with it, and once I manage to organise someone to run a second playtest I can always update/reupload the PDFs later if there are more changes/tweaks I want to make.

I’m not ever going to be super happy with how much work I’ve gotten done this year, but having at least a couple of big Finished Things under my belt at the end of it (and the short stories as well, I guess) will at least go a long way to making me feel like it hasn’t been a complete wash.

This afternoon I’m at least going to make an effort to get some more Blackened Hearts work done. We’ll see how I go.

I’m reorganizing myself a little and trying to focus on a couple of deadlines that are looming large on the horizon. I’m still working on game development stuff in Unity and struggling to make headway on my next novel, but the below are additional projects with real world deadlines that will impact me negatively if I miss them.

Blackened Hearts (10 June 2017)
I’ve organised an initial play test of Blackened Hearts, the pirate LARP I’ve been writing, to occur on 10 June. I don’t want to be writing the damn thing right up until the day of the event, so my deadline to entirely finish the play test documents is a week prior. Currently:

• 10 out of the 15 character roles have been written up and had an initial editing pass, so they’re pretty much play test ready, and the other 5 are still in varying stages of completion;
• the rules document that is to accompany them is about 66-ish% done — I did the initial write-up ages ago and have edited it since then, but there is now some extra stuff I need to add to it and I want to include a section on pirate gambling games that people can play during the LARP;
• the item cards are 90% done and ready to print, there’s just a few last-minute additions I need to make to finalise the document;
• the power cards are woefully underdone… I’ve got basic one-line descriptions written for about 75% of what I intend to include, with no actual cards finished yet.

Immediate goals: Today I intend to finalise the item cards and finish up at least one character role. Then, I’ll be angling to finalise another two character roles by the end of Friday and make a start on the power cards, with a view to completely finishing the LARP by the end of next week.

The Big Issue Fiction Edition (5 June 2017)
The Big Issue is accepting public submissions of short stories of up to 3,000 words for their next Fiction Edition — this is a paid gig if you’re accepted, so I’d really like to make it in. Submitted stories need to be previously unpublished, which means I can’t just use one of the ones I’ve already written and posted here. I need to work out what I want to write about and write the full thing. They only accept submissions by post, not email, so I don’t want to be writing right up to the deadline. Even if I don’t get accepted, it’ll at least give me another story I can post up here.

Immediate goals: Today I am going to read last year’s Fiction Edition, so I can see what sort of things they tend to accept. I’ll try to have a full concept and outline hammered out by the end of next week. Then I’ll try to finish it the week following.

Not Actual Deadlines

On top of those, there’s a couple of other things I’d really like to do in the upcoming weeks:

• An as-yet-unnamed script for a short horror film I’ve bee working on (about a third of the way done) that I’d really like to finish off before my birthday (18 June); and
• I want to commission some cover art for the short stories I’ve published on here so that I can package them as freebies on Amazon’s Kindle store as well. As they’re just going to be free, I’m not looking to spend a lot of cash on the art — I’m thinking minimalist, simple covers (Google minimalist book covers if you want to see the sort of thing I mean). I’ve got professional artist friends, but I don’t think what I’m looking for is worth their time or rates so I might just grab an artist off Fiverr. Again, I’d really like to do this before my birthday.